"Our marriage had come to an end," Butch Walker says of his split from Marvelous 3, whose single "Freak of the Week" -- from 1998's Hey! Album -- brought them plenty more than a week's worth of fame. "We were ready to move on and stay the best of friends, instead of hate each other from playing so damn long together."

Celebrity, modeling contracts and even a couple albums followed from the "Freak" explosion, but the Atlanta modern rock outfit never again reached the same level of popular success. "Over the last couple years," Walker continues, "the Marvelous 3 just started losing steam, just because we were at a shitty record label. So I ended up writing for a lot of other people: SR-71 and Lit. And I did some production for Injected."

Now the Atlanta-based Walker, the 3's former frontman and primary songwriter, has taken his keen pop sense solo. This winter he signed with Arista records, which released his debut solo effort, titled Left of Self-Centered, today.

How did your music change when you went solo?

Anyone that knows my music knows I'm a total pop junkie, so I wasn't going to do a real aggro record or a real heavy record. Most of my music has been just a day early, rather than a day late, so I'm not going to stop now and try to follow the trend. By the time it would come out it would be six months too late, anyway. So I just did what I do best, schizophrenic hard-rock music, the kind that comes from growing up on a healthy diet of Motley Crue and Elvis Costello. I don't really know any different way.

Where and when did you do the writing for the album?

Doing 250 shows a year for the last ten years can really fuck your social skills. You don't do anything but eat crappy food, inhale smoke, inhale a lot of alcohol -- no wonder Keith Richards looks so fucking bad. I didn't want that to happen to me. So I came off the road and holed up and just wrote -- probably about fifty songs. Of which I put about twelve on the record.

Just twelve?

With all due respect to my new label, until someone proves to me that they can break five or six songs from one record instead of one, I'm not going spew my load on one record. I'm going to save some of the songs and just make it a good record full of interesting songs and throw a couple of radio songs on there just to make the industry folks happy, and I'll go out there and tour and do my thing.

Was going solo something you had wanted to do, or did things just shake out that way?

I thought about playing solo a lot. But I haven't really done any other solo projects. I was just an artist in a band, the Marvelous 3 -- we had been band mates since we've been fifteen. I love my bros, but that's kind of why I decided to do a solo thing.

Why?

Well, I thought it would be fun to put out a record and be able to do all kinds of different things. When you grow up a music mutt, listening to so many different things, and when you can also play it and deliver it, it's not so much fun to rewrite "Freak of the Week" over and over again. You're not allowed much freedom these days with a fickle audience who doesn't want your shit to change up all the time. But all of a sudden, with a different band, under a different name, you can do some different things.

AUGUSTIN K. SEDGEWICK
(July 9, 2002)